Musings/Träumereien/Devaneios

(Original Review, 1981-04-01)



My understanding of close reading was what I described in another review gleaning from Empson, and I never intended to dismiss the idea of finding archetypes in literary characters. As far as that goes, I might put myself much closer to the other extreme and be tempted to say: every story contains archetypes because we have nothing else to tell stories about; even non-fiction stories are told primarily if not exclusively about real people who embody archetypes.

I’m now reading a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Language of the Night,” and she offers an interesting take on many of these issues from the writer’s point of view. She acknowledges the appearance of archetypes in her stories, but, with what she considers her best work, the story comes from within her and only after it is written does she recognize the archetype that inspired it:

“The writer who draws not upon the works and thoughts of others, but upon his own thoughts and his own deep being, will inevitably hit upon common material. The more original his work, the more imperiously recognizable it will be.”

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(Original Review, 1981-03-28)



When Booth came up with the idea of the "unreliable narrator," he wasn't speaking to writers; he was reminding critics and teachers and readers in general of something every decent writer of fiction has always known: that a narrator is a voice, and a voice is a character, and is still a character - a created fictional person - whether it has a name or is just an apparently omniscient intermediary.

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(Original Review, 1981-03-25)



Speaking of the femme fatale or fatale woman, she is hardly an invention of noir however automatically we identify the two. So much has focused on who and what Sam is, and what he is like, that Brigid's literary identity as opposed to her character and role in the plot get a little lost, which is exacerbated by our tendency to think of the archetype as inextricably identified with film noir. Brigid is an iconic femme fatale but the femme fatale is an ancient literary archetype, at least as old as Aeschylus' Prometheus is, for example Sophocles' Sphinx or Medusa.

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(Original Review, 1981-03-23)



Hammett I take to have a brilliant literary mind and to be well read in Literature. I take him to be able to know what a Byronic Hero is, what others thought about that, to have his own thoughts about it, as well as lots of other things (like about detective stories), of course. And I take him to have an idea of what a parable is and how it differs from a story, or what an archetype or double is. Take the 'double': all he has to do is READ Poe's William Wilson, or Dostoevsky’s “The Double” to get what it is as Literature. Or to read Hamlet to know how a “mise en abyme” works. He knows these things and uses them WITH THE MIND OF A BRILLIANT WRITER. A mind that processes literature not as a critic or simple reader, but as a creator of it.

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(Original Review, 1981-03-15)

“The Consul reached forward and absentmindedly managed a sip of whisky; the voice might have been either of his familiars or - Hullo, good morning. The instant the Consul saw the thing he knew it an hallucination and he sat, quite calmly now, waiting for the object shaped like a dead man and which seemed to be lying flat on its back by his swimming pool, with a large sombrero over its face, to go away. So the 'other' had come again. And now gone, he thought: but no, not quite, for there was still something there, in some way connected with it, or here, at his elbow, or behind his back, in front of him now; no, that too, wherever it was, was going: perhaps it had only been the coppery-tailed trogon stirring in the bushes, his 'ambiguous bird' that was now departed quickly on creaking wings, like a pigeon once it was in flight, heading for its solitary home in the Canyon of the Wolves, away from the people with ideas.”

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(Original Review, 1981-03-08)


"We don't do it that way...You're a storywriter. I can't trust you not to build up on what I tell you. I'll save mine till after you've spoken your piece, so yours won't be twisted to fit mine."

In “The Dain Curse” by Dashiell Hammett


"'Are you -- who make your living snooping -- sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it?'
'We're different...I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.'
'That's not different...I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.'"

In “The Dain Curse” by Dashiell Hammett

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(Original Review, 1981-02-01)



Harry Levin wrote a book called “The Power of Blackness” about Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, the classic trio of Dark Romance, and there is no doubt Blackness and Night haunt the human imagination and generate oneiric phantasms to boot. In the French cultural scene although surrealism was losing steam, it was still a powerful force and it did emphasize the oneiric, and Borde and Chaumeton were very interested in the grotesque, bizarre, and oneiric per se.

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(Original Review, 1999-12-10)



When one wants to elect the best of Dashiell Hammet, one invariably chooses “The Maltese Falcon”, Classic that it is, but instead I would go for Dashiell Hammett’s short novel, “Nightmare Town” as one of my favourites. The set up is brilliant and the wider issues - American criminality, capitalism, the mirage of consumption - is all combined with some brilliant intrigue, weird characters, and clean hard boiled prose. Unlike the Sam Spade novels, though, “Nightmare Town” has kind of palpable energy and ambition that gives it greater flavor as well as substance.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.